System Overview

The Open System Engineering Environment (OSEE) is an integrated, extensible tool environment for large engineering projects. OSEE is more than an integrated development environment (IDE), but is an integrated product life-cycle development environment. The system captures project data into a common user-defined data model providing bidirectional traceability, project health reporting, status, and metrics which seamlessly combine to form a coherent, accurate view of a project in real-time. By building on top of a central data model, OSEE provides an integrated configuration management, requirements management, implementation, testing, validation, and project management system. All of the components work together to help an organization achieve lean objectives by reducing management activities, eliminating data duplication, reducing cycle-time through streamlined processes, and improving overall product quality through work flow standardization and early defect detection.

OSEE High Level System Overview

OSEE is customizeable to meet the needs of the project. The teams working on the project, the roles they perform, and the processes they follow are all configureable within OSEE. Traceability is maintained from requirements through acceptance testing. Program management can customize the metrics gathered in order to best gain insight into the project status.

OSEE Quality Attributes

The following defines the high level quality attributes for the OSEE system

Changeability - New or updated features/services can easily be integrated into OSEE.

Extensability - The services/components provided with OSEE will be reusable and/or extendable.

Flexibility - The tailoring of OSEE for a specific project can be accomplished through configuration.

Performance - The system will respond in a timely manner to user input and queries.

Scalability - The system will scale as the number of users and managed projects increase.

OSEE Components

At the core of OSEE is the OSEE Framework. On top of the framework sits four core components: Action Tracking System (ATS), Define, Coverage, and Open System Engineering Test Environment (OTE). The User Management component, which allows for user authentication, verification and role based access control (RBAC), is used by all of the OSEE components.

OSEE Component Diagram

OSEE is built on top of Eclipse, and utilizes the OSGi framework to manage it's bundles.
Capabilities provided by 3rd party libraries and exposed in the Base Level API include:

OSEE Framework

The heart of the OSEE Framework is the Object Revision Control System (ORCS). ORCS provides the foundation the rest of the components are built on top of.
The key capabilities provided by ORCS are:

Object Management - The definition and persistance of any object of any simple or complex type can be managed, and type safety is ensured on all operations.

Data Model - the underlying data model is configurable per project

Version management - baselines and branching for a project are managed

Searching/Indexing

Transaction Management

Administration

Data Import/Export - external systems can supply or consume data

Data Model

The object management provides the core building blocks for the centralized data model. The core build block for the data model consists of:

Artifact - The fundamental object in OSEE. All data objects stored within OSEE are artifacts. Artifacts are strongly typed and can store any data throughout the systems engineering lifecycle. Artifacts have a Description, Type, and set of 1..n Attributes. Any type of data can be stored as an artifact; not only systems engineering data (such as processes and requirements), but also anything from meeting minutes to architecture diagrams.

Attribute - A specific piece of data attached to an Artifact. Attribute consists of Description, Type, default value (optional), Min occurances in an artifact, Max occurances in an artifacts.

Relation - Defines the relationship (link) between two artifacts. The relation is strongly typed, which means it can only be used to link the specified artifact types. The relation allows the multiplicity between the two types to specified as: 1..1, 1..*, *..1, *..*

Artifact Attribute Diagram

Version Management

Version management allows for the parallel development of different variations of a product, as-well-as the sharing of common information across similar products. Changes made to one version baseline can be merged to another version baseline in order to maintain commonality as desired.

The Action Tracking System (ATS) is a tightly integrated tracking system that manages changes throughout the different aspects of a product's lifecycle. ATS provides integrated change management to all OSEE applications through customizable work processes (workflows) and ensures traceability from start to completion.

ATS is highly configurable and can be configured to meet any project's work tracking needs. The level of detail of work items, team organization, process to complete work item types are all configurable for a project. The configuration is realized through the use of the data model to create the core building blocks of ATS: Action, Actionable Item, Team Definition, Workflow Definition, Task, Version.

At the highest level, an item of work to be completed is referred to as an Action. Actions are created as work is needed for a project.

A project can specify a work hierarchy for the different kinds of work tasks that need to be performed and tracked. Each defined work category is referred to as an Actionable Item (AI). An Action can be composed of a single or multiple AIs.

Actionable Item Hierarchy Example

A team can be assigned to work on an AI. The team definition is similar to an organization chart, or a logical grouping of teams that perform certain types of work.

Team Definition Example

Each Team Definition has a Workflow Definition (or state machine) that defines the process that team uses to track and complete the work. Each state of the workflow can have configured conditions or fields that are required to transition. A Review can be attached to a state and can block the tranisition until successfully completed.

Workflow Definition Example

A Task is the lowest level of work, and is used to allocate the work to individuals. A Task can be associated with a particular state or a state can have multiple tasks that need completing before the workflow can advance to the next state.

Task Allocation Example

A Version is used to group a set of Actions together into a "build", "release", "edition", etc.

Status data associated with tasks can be used to create metrics that roll-up to the Workflow, which can roll up to the Team, which can roll-up to the Action, which roll-up to the projuct. Metrics can be obtained for any specified grouping within the project (e.g. Team, Version, etc.)

Define

Define is the requirements management component of OSEE. Define provides support for concurrent and distributed requirements development. Requirements can be imported from other sources to provide comprehensive and coherent requirements management across the product life-cycle.

will have bidirectional traceability from beginning to end of the product life-cycle

will have meaningful review metrics

can support parallel project development

Coverage

Coverage provides for the configuration management and tracking of coverage disposition efforts throughout a project. OSEE allows for the configuration of what is tracked for verification and validation on the project. For example, in a software project the lines of code in the software can be exercised through software tests, and tools can determine how many of the software lines of code where executed during the tests. A report is generated and can be imported by Coverage and a complete coverage report generated.

High Level Coverage Overview

The Coverage is configurable through the creation of a Coverage Package. The Coverage Package configuration includes all the inputs (unit tests, test scripts, coverage test report imports), traceability (results to tests, tests to requirements) and outputs (reports, metrics) desired. The Coverage Package will also allow for checking the differences between test runs by comparing different instances of test result imports.

Open System Engineering Test Environment (OTE)

OTE is an integrated approach to product testing, and follows a client/server architecture. The OTE client is part of the OSEE client, while the OTE Server is separate from the OSEE Application Server.
The OTE Client provides for:

Test Manager for configuration and automated testing

An API to create simulated components (models)

Managing of test scripts

Real-time test result monitoring, recording, and playback

The OTE Test Server provides for:

A test execution manager

A simulated test environment that manages/executes models

Managing I/O connections to the target test environment

OTE Architecture Diagram

OSEE Functional Use Cases

OSEE Deployment

OSEE utilizes the client-server paradigm to seperate the user interface from the component capabilities. The clients first contact an arbitration server, which may also be an application server, to be matched up with an appropriate server based on version and server load.